Stitching History from the Holocaust: a Czech dressmaker's story sewn into life at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee

There’s another impressive little exhibit at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee (JMM) through February28th of next year:  Stitching History from the Holocaust.  It tells the heartbreaking story of a German-speaking Czech Jew named Hedvika “Hedy” Strnad & her husband Paul.  At age 39, Hedy ran a successful dressmaking shop in Aussig (Usti nad Labem), Czechoslovakia.  But it was 1938.  

The Nazis came & swallowed the Sudetenland, with ignominious Allied blessing, destroying the Strnads & their whole Jewish community within a few terrifying years.  Perhaps worse, our government did nothing to help the Strnads when they desperately sought refuge in the USA.  Paul's typed letters to cousin Alvin Strnad in Milwaukee hang on the gallery walls like silent screams.  

An envelope from abroad bears the dreaded SS logo, an occupying bureaucratic censor’s stamp of approval. The so-called affidavit of necessity required by Uncle Sam didn’t suffice to save the couple.  They were deemed too average to deserve a precious US visa.  

But this story has a sort of happy ending. In a sense, the exhibit itself is an act of redemption, a gesture of regret on behalf of a talented woman, a cultured Czech citizen who died beside her husband in the Warsaw Ghetto in April 1942.  The JMM worked with the costume shop of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater in bringing several of Hedy Strnad’s designs to life.  

These artists of cloth took great pains to find or create just the right fabrics, prints, colors & other details.  The seamstresses' results are beautifully draped on forms: a pair of modest blue & white dresses as well as a fine modern lady’s well-shouldered grey suit.  The Old World patterns that led to these retro-garments were probably illustrated by Hedy herself.  Meant to be the Strnads ticket to escape the coming Holocaust, they at least inspired a moving labor of love 75 years later.   

Prof. Beverly Gordon, a fashion & textile historian at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), gave a companion talk called “Hedvika Strnad & Czech Fashions of the 1930s” at a JMM luncheon on December 4th.  She suggested that, given a history marked by medieval pogroms, the 1745 expulsion from Prague & the anti-semitic horror shows inflicted by central European fascists, Czech Jews could never feel entirely secure.  No wonder the paranoid literary genius of Franz Kafka sprang from Prague Jewry.  

Nazi documents show that 92,000 remaining Jews were deported to concentration camps & walled ghettos from Bohemia & Moravia by the Germans in 1941-42.  The vast majority died during the war, either by brutal murder or criminal neglect.  A lucky few (e.g. pre-war Kindertransports to England) managed to escape the genocide.  The Strnads too tried hard in 1939.  

Unfortunately, like many others abandoned by indifferent foreign authorities, Hedy & Paul didn’t manage to get a golden ticket to freedom.  Official US records show that thousands of American refugee visas, which might have been issued to European Jews in 1939, instead went unused, making Adolf Hitler's plans for a Final Solution feasible.  Imagine what a vibrant would-be immigrant like Hedy Strnad might have added to our country & its culture.  

It makes me wonder about those Central American refugees that our federal government deports to dangerous places.  How many more Hedy Strnads must die before we learn compassion for endangered strangers?

NOTE:  This exhibit provided the occasion for a catalog about the Strnads & their plight, available for purchase on the JMM website:  www.jewishmuseummilwaukee.org  

[© 2014 by J.C. Mrazek]

This Face for Lease: Putin's Olympics & Some New Political Ad Platforms

I've been limiting my exposure to NBC's saturation coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics.  It's not that I don't appreciate sports played on snow & ice.  As a matter of fact, I'm captivated by the traditional Nordic facsimile of flight called ski jumping.  I applaud the International Olympic Committee (IOC), somewhat sarcastically, for finally letting women compete in that daredevil event.  

Rather, my reluctance to watch the Sochi games - as with the 2008 Beijing Olympiad - stems from the inconvenient truth that they serve as a vast advertising platform for a loathsome tyrannical regime.  Sadly, every flash of the IOC's interlocking-rings logo now reminds me of the ambitious bully who brought the winter games to subtropical Sochi, Russian President Vladimir Putin.  

Conniving with his plutocratic cronies, Putin spent billions of stolen rubles for this chance to strut his ugly ego on a global stage.  Nevertheless, I have witnessed a few amusing moments amidst all the bullshit extolling the Olympian ideal.  Last weekend, for example, I caught that baldpate Putin's creepy deadpan perma-scowl polluting my TV screen.  

As NBC's cameras lingered on his soulless Mussolini-like visage, I noticed no less than four brand logos sewn onto Putin's turtleneck top & tight fleece jacket.  That's about as many product placements as the money-grubbing IOC now permits the athletes to wear.  I know that Vlad the Huckster fancies himself a supreme sportsman, but surely this ad ploy is taking things too far.  

After a shudder of revulsion at the Russian host's display of personal commercialism, I realized the brilliance of the idea.  What a triumph of economic opportunism!  It takes an ex-KGB comrade to dream up such an outrageous advertising scheme.  Putin's self-sponsorship at Sochi makes American politicians seem like a bunch of pikers when it comes to generating wealth.  

Upon further reflection, I had a brainstorm of my own:  if properly adapted, what a breakthrough in American political fundraising this could become.  Before dismissing Putin's promotional innovation as a gimmick befitting only undemocratic leaders, consider the possibilities for the USA's money-driven two-party system.  

The U.S. Senate could sell the naming rights to its legislative chamber.  The "Citibank Senate" has a nice alliterative ring to it.  Our cash-strapped House of Representatives could offer a Seattle-based coffee company a publicity coup simply by declaring the capitol a Starbucks-only, foreign-tea-free zone - for a generous fee, of course.  

For his part, our Commander-in-Chief could reduce the federal deficit by taking bids on a new moniker for the Pentagon.  Even the "Boeing Building" might seem appropriate now that the 9/11 attacks are receding from national memory.  While we're at it, how about replacing that lame official name "White House" with the cooler "Apple iPad"?  It appeals more to the digital generation, assuming that today's dumbed-down young folks get the joke - "pad" being an old hipster term for residence, you see.  

From the Great Free-market Beyond, the ghosts of Steve Jobs & Ronald Reagan gaze upon our work & beam.  Freedom never comes at no cost & neither should the Olympics.  Once upon a time Barack Obama raised millions of campaign dollars by embodying the generic Audacity of Hope.  More in step with the march of hyper-capitalism, President-for-life Putin shamelessly embodies the Effrontery of Exploitation.  By adorning his sporty outfit with various corporate logos while being photographed at an Olympic venue, Putin even out-hustled that notoriously crafty dictator of yore, Adolf Hitler.  

The Führer, after all, merely used the 1936 Berlin Olympics to promote his own political brand.  Worse yet, it was legally a nonprofit brand.  Hitler's henchmen covered the German capital in patriotic red-white-black bunting & an omnipresent swarm of swastikas, the (IOC-approved) Nazi logo.  Then a modest African-American athlete appeared & singlehandedly spoiled the Nazis' coming-out party.  Amazingly, Jesse Owens exposed Joseph Goebbels's racist Aryan-superiority propaganda as nonsense by simply running faster & jumping farther than anyone else.  

Let's hope that the homophobic dissident-oppressor Putin gets a similar comeuppance on his home turf.  I'd love to see an international alliance of ice dancers & hockey players use their muscular bodies to form a giant human protest sign in the Fisht Olympic Stadium during the closing ceremony at Sochi:  "PUSSY RIOT LIVES!"  

It's a rare photo-op for human rights.  Why not use it to display the humane, cooperative spirit that the modern Olympic games are supposed to represent?   If the IOC says a Tongan luge-slider can compete as "Bruno Banani" (the name of his German-underwear sponsor), then maybe we really shall overcome someday.  At least until the next commercial.

[For Kimman Harmon, former hockey player, downhill skier extraordinaire & far-out lesbian, of Boulder, CO (USA).]